Is the traditional family the foundation of democracy? It’s the foundation of many things—happiness, social order, identity—and it’s essential to the good working of democracy too. The family, with marriage as its foundation, is the first building block of civil society, and democracy is reliant on the idea of people being able to self-govern, to control themselves, to tend to their own needs and not just be servants of the state or, God forbid, wards of the state. There are necessary tasks the family performs that involve love, care, selflessness, which the state is very bad at. Whenever the state is called upon to do these tasks, it fails. Unfortunately, in our society, 40 percent of children are now born to unmarried women, and a majority spend some time in a single-parent home before the age of...

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